METALHUNDER our first printed-media feature

 

So we get an email from this guy called Jurgen who says he is from Metal Hunder, a widely respected metal magazine in Norway. It is monthly, actually gets real people to pay for a copy and they want to write about 9 o'clock Nasty! Click on the cover to see it in full res.

Well... it would have been rude to say no. We're absolutely made up - we have a digital copy and a paper copy of the magazine on order. We've run the piece through google translate and Pete has applied his knowledge of the language to tidy this up.

Click on image to see full size

Text:

NEW BAND NEW MUSIC

9 o’clock Nasty: A surreal gasp from the corpse of British alternative rock.

Many people in Norway will have heard of Leicester City Football Club. Some will have heard of Kasabian. In truth though there are a limited number of reasons to be familiar with this anonymous city in an increasingly anonymous country. But even a dying bonfire can release sparks and 9 o’clock Nasty are starting some tiny fires all over social media with their idiosyncratic yet direct brand of hard rock.

Enigmatic to the point of obscurity they are difficult to categorise, lurching from a dynamic guitar powered attack in one song to lush synthesised landscapes on the next. The song selected for the MH November playlist is called “Gravy Train” and smashes together a twisted mess of rockabilly with a lapsed Madchester delivery. They take form after form of music as their birthright and betray each in turn. Their songs, rarely longer than 2 minutes long are earworms that stay with you for days.

Described as “Proletarian Art Rock” by a reviewer, MH visited the band for some cold beers at their studio-complex, a rambling eccentric hall on the edge of the city. Filled with guitars and wreckage of amplifiers, speakers and drum kits it is like a shore after a shipwreck. The studio itself is little better, bare wires twisted around salvaged analogue equipment. And yet the troubled three create music relentlessly here, with five EPs and an album in five months with more to come.

MH: Do you think the speed with which you record gives your music freshness?

9N: Probably. That isn’t deliberate. We aren’t aiming to be fresh, we are aiming to produce something good and we work the way we work. Some ideas need to be set out before you think about them too much. There is a myth that a band needs to work and refine at a song in the rehearsal room until everyone is happy with it. That just leads to songs that compromise and fit into the shape of the way the band play. But the way the band plays should change to fit the song. The song comes first.

MH: We have read that you are part of a new movement. A return of garage rock. Is that something you are aware of?

9N: Only when someone like you says it. We are just working at our music here and what comes out comes out. Some people have said some nice things about our work and that is truly wonderful. We actually had our first bad review this week which seems like we have crossed a line. But the ideas of a movement is the kind of things that people with a computer make up. We aren’t sitting in smoky bars with other bands dreaming of changing the world. We just want to fuck up our corner of it.

MH: What next for 9 O’clock Nasty?

We will keep promoting our LP for the next few months and there is a single “Sexy Back” out this month. Right now we are rehearsing to play live. Teaching ourselves how to play the songs and adapting them to performing live.

Their debut LP “Catch Nasty” is available for download from their website www.9nasty.com. 

Please note, we never described Leicester as anonymous! That is Jurgen's prose.